In the climate-action alphabet, whoever says A must
say B. Or to restate climate matters in ethical terms, whoever wills the end must will the necessary means. So if the window for
effective climate action is narrow and getting ever narrower--and if the
politics is almost hopeless--whoever wishes to save the climate must be willing
to take desperate political measures.
If you care about saving a humanly livable climate, endless other animal
species--and, quite likely, human civilization itself--let the urgency of desperate political action imbue every
brain cell and seep into every pore. It's the basis of everything I'm about to
say.

My proposed climate-battle plan involves desperate
action. Average citizens of prosperous Western nations--even average "adrenaline
junkies"--have scarcely a grain of appetite for desperate action. After all, the
very purpose of prosperous, civilized societies was to eliminate the need for desperate
action from most people's lives. But when such societies risk imminent
destruction--as all of Western Europe did from Hitler's Germany in World War II--it's
time to crank up your atrophied "fight or flight" response and get busy. And to
repudiate those--as Churchill repudiated Neville Chamberlain--who undermine
battle plans and assure us "business as usual" will serve us just fine. Too
much of human nature is on the side of lazy complacency for its seducers' blandishments
not to prove extremely dangerous in societal crises. Before proceeding to my
battle plan, I must warn against the seductions of a powerful, determined
saboteur of desperation strategies like mine who has emerged at OpEdNews: "investigative
historian" Eric Zuesse.

To be blunt, the evidence from Zuesse's articles
strongly suggests (1) he has utterly given up on climate action himself but (2)
he exaggerates the climate virtue of a progressive like Elizabeth Warren
because--though he's despaired of effective climate action himself--he wishes to
herd those of us naïve to still believe there's hope into the Democratic Party,
where it's very questionable we
belong. To which I add (3): that he publishes articles promoting near-despair on climate because he wants no one to maintain enough hope to seek effective action--which would involve calling out Democrats.

If I spend so much valuable space exposing Zuesse's agenda, it's
because it's a sneaky, subtle, dishonest one--ably pursued by an intelligent,
capable writer of genuine investigative talent. In fact, it's Zuesse's very
plausible pose of objectivity--based on real investigative gifts gone wrong--that
makes him so dangerous a Democratic Party flack. So dangerous, in fact, that exposing him necessarily became part of a battle plan--soon to be covered
in more detail--that he'd otherwise surreptitiously undermine and destroy.

If I accuse Zuesse of dishonesty, it's precisely
because of his intelligence and ability, which I initially thought would make
him an effective climate-action ally. Given how well he sees--sees, for example, the
desperateness of the climate issue or sees through the regressive phoniness of Obama or Hillary Clinton--I don't think his
failure to do what's needed on climate ("whoever says A must say B") is based
on any mistake of fact or logic. And if he, like my former-activist wife, has
merely given up on climate, based on the narrow and vanishing window for action
and the sheer horror of the politics (which includes
the criminal climate irresponsibility of Democrats), that's a position I can
understand and intellectually respect. Granted, I probably wouldn't adopt it
myself, since, if any real hope
remains, surrender to hopelessness is merely a self-fulfilling,
world-condemning prophecy.

But I can fully understand the sense that a fight is
so desperately uphill that it's no
longer worth one's personal effort; in fact, if I can't mobilize urgent climate
action by my writings, that is the
stance I will take myself. But Zuesse's article on global-warming acceleration,
forcefully sketching the grimness of the situation with no call for heroic, crisis-level activism, merely suggests the
attitude of someone who has despaired. And who therefore has no right to
package Warren's first tentative pro-climate step as a panacea for our climate
ills. Will the real Eric Zuesse please
stand up? Based on his willingness to elevate Democrat Elizabeth Warren to
climate sainthood on so little evidence (especially given the deplorable climate
slouchiness of the party she belongs to) and his unprovoked personal nastiness
toward us who'd hold Dems responsible
for their climate (and other progressive) failings, I'd say the real Eric Zuesse is the shill for "progressive"
Democrats.

If I put "progressive" before "Democrats" in scare
quotes, meaning I don't mean the
label to be taken at face value, it marks my vast difference in perception from Eric
Zuesse--a difference from him I share with numerous top-notch progressive
intellectuals. Namely, that rank-and-file Democrat pols are hunky-dory, and the
only problem is some bad apples among
the leadership. Now, among the progressive luminaries who'd differ with Zuesse on that perception are heavy hitters like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein,
Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, and Nobel
laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz; their lesser-known but still-respectable
company includes such writers and activists as John Stauber, founder of the Center
for Media and Democracy, or black leftist writers and journalists like Cornel
West and Tavis Smiley, or Glen Ford and Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report. Or pick virtually any writer for Counterpunch, or almost any guest (many of them
respected economists) on Paul Jay's Real News Network or Amy
Goodman's Democracy Now. Yet Zuesse has the trick, based on a combo of know-it-all
arrogance and genuine investigative skill, of acting as if his position is the only one anyone with half a brain could
dream of holding. Which made me a tad perturbed when Zuesse, in a comment to
his Warren article, pontifically dismissed as "nonsense" or "foolish" viewpoints I share
with most of the luminaries named here. One would think an "investigative historian"
would have taken the trouble to investigate opinions shared by top minds on the
intellectual left. Or do they not count because they're not Democrats?

That Zuesse dismisses--or utterly ignores--widely
shared progressive opinion so breezily is a further hint to me he's not playing
an honest game. As is the fact that his supposedly hunky-dory Democratic Party
elevates as top leaders the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Dianne
Feinstein, or marched in virtual lockstep with Bush's liberty-crushing Patriot
Act and criminal Iraq war. To say nothing of Obama's assaults on civil
liberties, bank regulation, the social safety net, a free press, transparent government
and trade treaties, and international law. Or, most relevantly here, on global-climate agreements. That Democrats at minimum tolerated all of these assaults
on progressive values--and that many of them, like the crushing of Occupy Wall
Street, happened on Obama's watch--is the reason a vast sector of progressive opinion does not find the remedy to all our ills in merely electing "progressive"
Democrats. Rather than breezily, arrogantly dismissing--or utterly ignoring--that
sector, Zuesse, if he means to be intellectually honest, should feel he bears a
heavy burden of proof in facing and rebutting its arguments.

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And never are those arguments stronger than when it
comes to climate change, where the last
thing we should be doing is consecrating first-time climate activists like
Warren as climate saints. On the contrary, so bad are Democrats on climate--and,
even on Zuesse's own showing, so corruptly are Dem leaders like Hillary yoked
to fossil fuels--that I feel we need a climate- action Tea Party to reform them.
And in my next OEN article, I'll lay out a full strategic battle plan for that
climate Tea Party. But first I had to discredit seductive underminer Zuesse, the climate-action
Neville Chamberlain who'd urge us not to do battle with Democrats at all.

Patrick Walker is co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy (RAP) and the Bernie or Bust movement it spawned. Before that, he cut his activist teeth with the anti-fracking and Occupy Scranton PA movements.
No longer with RAP, he actively seeks (more...)